A week later, and the balloon is still (at least partially) inflated. Tasks for this week involve working out the optimal pressure for the HAB – too low and it won’t get off the ground, too high and it will leak under its own pressure. As the altitude increases pressure decreases rapidly, and at an …
Today we created our first (partially) working prototype of the balloon! The initial design for 4 semi-circular sections was quickly replaced with a 2-circle approach, where we cut out two one-meter diameter circles from our roll of plastic. This was because the extra work involved in welding 4 sections, combined with the welds being the …
Some photos of our latest project – a GPS disciplined oscillator for use with our radio systems. Massive thanks to Cambridge Circuit Company for yet more great quality PCBs.
Yesterday’s successful HAB launch to send three teddy bears into space for a local primary school. Thanks to BOC online for suppliying the helium for the launch!
Current radios on High Altitude Ballons (HABs) are laughably slow, on the order of 50 bits/s. While this can suffice for transmitting simple data strings such as GPS co-ordinates, it’s useless for anything else. There have been several attempts at in-flight image transmission for amateur HABs with existing radios, though these took around 6 minutes …
A while ago, the nice folks at Bronkhorst gave us a helium-compatible gas flow meter on loan. This shiny (literally) bit of kit allows us to deliver precise quantities of helium to our high altitude balloons, hopefully increasing the accuracy of our predictions. The flow meter needs control from a PC (with an RS232 port!), …
The stainless steel stencils manufactured by Hackvana arrived today. Parts will be ordered soon ready for getting at least one board manufactured and running in the coming week. Some pictures of the stencil:
The PCBs for the second revision of the Joey-M flight computer have arrived from Cambridge Circuit company. This revision carries some minor fixes from the first as well as the addition of the new CUSF logo to the rear silkscreen. Thanks once again to Cambridge Circuit Company for these fantastic boards.
On Wednesday 28th March, we flew NOVA21 and NOVA22. NOVA21 NOVA21 went up at around 1330BST carrying JOEY-M, Squirrel (the Android project) and a special guest. It got to 27.2km altitude before burst, landing near Braintree. The flight was mostly a test of the new Joey and Squirrel flight code. Joey performed well, though there was …
NOVA21 had a special guest on board the flight: Wee Rex from Dinosaur Comics! He’s an adorable fluffy squishy stuffed T-Rex. We mounted him on a couple of sticks of balsa wood to the payload containing JOEY-M and the cameras: Then we sent him up, getting a ton of good photos: He got to approximately …
